WHEN seminarians in Poznan told the Polish daily GazetaWyborcza late last year that the local archbishop regularlymade homosexual advances toward them, the paper's editorsdid nothing.

It was an explosive story in an intensely Catholic land.The archbishop, Juliusz Paetz, was an associate of PopeJohn Paul II, and one Gazeta reporter said the editors wereafraid of offending advertisers. Whatever the reason, notuntil the Warsaw daily Rzeczpospolita broke the news twomonths ago did Gazeta publish its own detailed account. Inthe uproar that followed, Monseignor Paetz resigned.

Gazeta's skittishness about the story may be extreme. Butit casts light on a striking contrast between the UnitedStates and Europe. While sexual abuse by Catholic priestshas come to light as far afield as Canada, England, France,Germany, Austria and Poland, only in places like Irelandand Australia, where the allegations have run into thethousands, has the scandal generated anything approachingthe unrelenting public concern it has in the United States.

So the question arises: Does the problem not really existin most of Europe? Are European priests more repressed?Does the church here deal with the problem moreeffectively?

For certain, there have been fewer allegations ofpedophilia among priests in most European countries than inAmerica. But it is impossible to know how much of that isdue to differences in reporting the problem, rather than inthe extent of the problem itself.

Pedophilia, like rape, can confer shame on the victim aswell as the accused. So cultural differences about handlingsuch shame can account for differences in the numbers ofoffenses reported.

On the other hand, students of the American church'shistory have noted that enthusiasm for entering thepriesthood has fallen off drastically in recent decades,leading them to think that lower recruitment standards mayallow for the admission of more people susceptible tosexual lapses.

In Dublin, The Irish Times suggested in a recent commentarythat Irish Catholic puritanism and clericalauthoritarianism may have left the Irish church, inparticular, feeling invulnerable and unaccountable, openingthe door to abuse. That kind of reasoning is another effortto account for the high numbers of cases reported in theUnited States and Australia, where the Roman Catholicchurch has a strong Irish strain, as well as in Irelanditself.

This is not to say the problem does not also existelsewhere. In France, 30 priests have been convicted ofsexual abuse since 1995; Britain had 21 such cases from1995 to 1999, and in Germany, there were 13 in the lasteight years. Yet Peter Wensierski, a religion writer forthe German weekly Der Spiegel, says, "Even if you considera certain number of unreported cases, the number isprobably not considerably higher."

Some analysts suggest that Europe's Catholic leadersreacted more quickly to the problem than did America's.England's bishops, for instance, issued strict rules twoyears ago for dealing with pedophilia that are not unlikethose being discussed only now by America's bishops. InFrance, the bishop published a severe formal condemnationof pedophilia at about the same time.

In addition, many Europeans point to the more litigiousculture and feistier news media across the Atlantic as away of accounting for the uproar that reports of pedophiliahave provoked.

"There are different traditions in the media and in thejudiciary in the United States," said Austen Ivereigh,assistant editor of the British Catholic paper The Tablet.American news organizations pour larger sums intoinvestigative reporting than their European counterparts,he said, and American courts allow the disclosure ofdocuments that remain confidential in Europe.

Bernard Valadon is president of Bouclier - The Shield - aFrench organization that battles pedophilia. In France, hesaid, there is cultural resistance in the church, the newsmedia and in politics to even discussing the question ofpedophilia. "People simply do not want to have to imaginethese things," he said.

VATICAN conservatives go further, arguing that the turmoilin America stems from a hidden agenda by liberals who wantto parlay the issue into change in crucial areas, likewomen's ordination or priestly celibacy. Or, they say, theoutcry is prompted by a desire for material gain.Archbishop Tarcisio Bertone, the assistant to CardinalJoseph Ratzinger, the German cardinal responsible forhandling sexual abuse cases, told the Italian Catholicmonthly 30 Giorni recently of "well-founded suspicions"that many sexual abuse cases in the United States served"only to make money through civil litigation."

Such arguments prompt Mr. Valadon to assert that theCatholic hierarchy has "adopted, globally, an attitude ofnegation." Church officials reject such suggestions,pointing to slow but firm action by the church and stronglegislative and police measures to fight pedophilia ingeneral.

Yet there is a lingering sense that Europe simply suffers atime lag. "Generally, we do have a problem, though not onthe scale of the United States," Mr. Ivereigh of The Tabletsaid. But that, he added, poses another question: "Will it all be happening in five years' time, in all ourcountries?"

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